Hacker News Reader

Comment by bikelang | Hacker News Reader

Just curious - what do you think the current best git platforms are?

What ever happened to Hudson/Jenkins? That was the full featured CI/CD solution before github actions.

I'm not at all a fan of GitHub actions, but come on, Hudson/Jenkins was a nightmare world, GitHub actions is a million times better

Jenkins is in every way a “Java” program, and not the good kind.

What you can say for it, is that it was free and near infinitely hackable.

I use Jenkins every single day, and have been using it my entire career through three different companies self hosting it.

Please tell me how we somehow have been hobbled despite having simple and clear pipelines setup that autobuild any branch we want and allow one click deploys to our preprod environment and automatically manage versioning and scalably handle load from "Literally zero" to "Everyone in the company wants to rebuild everything now" and goes down less than github.

What are we supposedly missing?

More importantly, what are we missing that tangibly improves results for our consumers?

Assuming all those three were post-Jenkinsfile, it’s pretty decent.

Multibranch is still weird and obviously added-on.

Writing plugins is ugly.

Working with Jenkins CasC, JobDSL and declarative pipelines, I'm not sure where the million times comes from. Sure, there are some annoying parts, and GHA has the social network for reusable actions, but apart from that it's not that different.

Oldschool maven type jobs where you type shell script into a `<textarea>`? Yeah, let's not talk about those, but we don't have a single one left anymore.

Jenkins Groovy is awful and full of footguns. Have you ever run into a serialization exception?

It's too powerful and there are too many of its implementation details exposed to the user.

I haven't seen a serialization exception, but I have run into plenty of footguns with YAML (ref GitHub Actions).

The DSL semantics can be weird with when things like params/env expansions in options block are evaluated.

That also is/was awful. But it's just another platform like GHA, and the solution to this kind of thing is always the same, should not be surprising, and is boring in the good way. Write automation so that it's not tightly coupled to the platform on the backend. If you can't migrate between platforms then you're eventually going to be unhappy.

If someone is forcing you towards high stakes tight-coupling with no thought whatsoever towards the lock-in, you should get it in writing that "we at ${org} are fully committed to ${vendor} with ${platform}, on ${cloud} using ${tech} come what may, now and forever" and lots of sign off so that everyone knows who to blame when this is inevitably wrong.

Azure DevOps is the gold standard for Pipelines.

That's not saying much, since it's still dependent upon the untyped mess that is YAML.

YAML is just a data format. Make your own "thing" that takes input in any format you desire, then dump it to YAML. (also, YAML is dynamically typed, and supports explicit typing, but the parser can choose to ignore it)

these days we generate yaml out of cue

i don't know why it's not more popular.

Really?

I grant you pipelines are the best bit about ado, but the fact that you can’t test them is a pain.

And the webhooks and templating are pretty messy and unpleasant quickly.

We’re changing from ADO to GitHub (had to be an MS product for corporate) and the infra people are looking forward to GHA as they prefer their maintenance to ADO pipelines.

AD is just sourcesafe/tfs/vsts with rebranding, each time trying to get rid of the bad reputation in developer circles.

if only they supported ed25519 ssh keys

git

Reply on news.ycombinator.com